It's simple you find another job. Companies get away with this kind of behavior because employees tend to be lazy and not move jobs. If companies realize that people will leave when they don't make sure salary automatically keeps pace with industry standards and inflation they will adjust their pay practices.
You don't say what industry you're working on but I think it's a fair assumption you're probably an IT of some sort. If so the job market is wide open right now, and it's pretty wide open for any industry. Go find another job that will have the increase that you want.
Not all employers behave this way but it does take a while to find a good one. My employer adjusted salaries late last year outside of merit increases and I received a 6% bump and pay for among other things inflation and just the general pay scale adjustment because the industry has started to pay more due to things like inflation.
> It's simple you find another job. Companies get away with this kind of behavior because employees tend to be lazy and not move jobs.
It's not that employees tend to be lazy. There are real costs to switching jobs. Depending on the industry, you may have to devote many hours studying for the interview and spend time interviewing. Switching jobs is also risky because you may not like the job as much and you'll have to rebuild all the good will.
> If companies realize that people will leave when they don't make sure salary automatically keeps pace with industry standards and inflation they will adjust their pay practices.
You're assuming inflation means wage inflation. Just because goods went up 7% doesn't mean salaries necessarily went up by that amount. An employer prices to the market for talent, not to how much people need to maintain purchasing parity relative to last year.
Inflation does mean wage inflation because inflation across the board means all things become inflated. That's what the generic measure of inflation is. Now if you take a specific product one may inflate in another may deflate in relation to one another. When you take the overall inflation metric of your number of 7% that is overall the price of houses may have risen faster and the price of onions may have stayed the same or gone down but the average is 7%. Therefore your wage is also a part of that average and so you should average a 7% in relation to everything else.
Because that 7% means your employer is also selling their product at an average of 7% higher because they're consumables are an average of 7% more. Of which one of the consumables that a company purchases is employees.
When you talk about the risk of changing jobs if you're working for a company that does not automatically adjust your wage for inflation then I submit your working at a job that you should not like.
The only real exception to this is the case of hyperinflation where your economy is going into a death spiral. And that's a very real thing that happens in some countries but it doesn't appear to be what's happening now at least in the United States. When your economy suffers hyperinflation you have much bigger problems because you're getting ready for a complete economic collapse.
I think what GP may have meant is that wage inflation has different factors than overall inflation.
Wages aren’t based on cost directly, but supply and demand. So it’s possible that inflation is up 10% because food, rent, etc but there’s still tons of people willing to do a job so wages did not match inflation.
So it’s important to look at how wages are doing rather than just straight lining from inflation.
I think based on the current economy and super low unemployment that wages have increased as well. Perhaps more than inflation.
Unfortunately there are real costs of changing a job. Even a 20% is sometimes not worth the struggle of interviewing and getting used to the new company culture.
You don't say what industry you're working on but I think it's a fair assumption you're probably an IT of some sort. If so the job market is wide open right now, and it's pretty wide open for any industry. Go find another job that will have the increase that you want.
Not all employers behave this way but it does take a while to find a good one. My employer adjusted salaries late last year outside of merit increases and I received a 6% bump and pay for among other things inflation and just the general pay scale adjustment because the industry has started to pay more due to things like inflation.